Enterprise Vault as standalone archive (removing connections with Exchange mailbox)

[LostInDocumenta]

My organization currently uses the Enterprise Vault 11.0.1 

The business requirements are 

1. Users are required to manage their archiving (3 month Exchange mailbox policy, multi-year Archive policy), this is achieved by having the user manually move items to the archive

2. Users typically use a drag and drop method to place items into the vault (for which we use vault cache)

There are a few situations where this becomes problematic. There are several users who have multiple folders in their archive that do not exist in their mailbox or vice versa. When users attempt to move items between folders or delete folders, they may get error messages stating that they are unable to do so because the folder exists in exchange. I have also observed in a few cases a user will move an item in the vault cache and Enterprise vault will move it back to its original location.

Under the Exchange mailbox policy, under the Moved Items tab, Update archive location for items moved in the mailbox is checked, however since we are not using shortcuts and delete the item after archiving, I don't think this is having any affect.

The simplist solution for me would be to sever the tie between Enterprise Vault and Exchange and have the vault exist independently of Exchange. I have been reading up on zapping mailboxes, (and if anyone has a good write up on it, it would be appreciated) as a possible solution, but from what I understand, this will reset the permissions on the archive, not sure if it will clear info on what folder an email item came from.

Has anyone had similar business requirements and does anyone know of a way to allow users to edit their vault independantly of their Exchange mailbox?

[GertjanA]

The archive is tied to the mailbox. Zapping mailboxes would remove the ability of your users to archive.

That (as it seems) is not the goal you try to achieve right?

You write you use Virtual Cache, I assume that is in conjunction with Virtual Vault?

If so, I suggest you play with Virtual Vault settings on both the desktop and mailbox policy. It should be possible to use Virtual Vault to move things around in the archive, which should be synced back to the archive. In addition to this, I blieve (but will have to test myself) you can also use the new search (EVS, which you should have, as you are on 11.0.1) to perform actions like this.

I suggest to set up a (simple) test environment, so you can test settings.